ABSTRACT
To attempt to inscribe selfhood under the rhetorical pressures of generic selves, imagined, formulated, and circulated by social superiors who wielded enormous infl uence on institutions of literate culture, such as the periodical press, the publishing industry, and the literary marketplace, is to struggle with a truly formidable autobiographical enterprise. The epigraph from The Servants’ Magazine demonstrates how the seduction-betrayal plot was deployed not just for its commercial and sensational value in pseudo servant autobiography, but in fact lent itself handily as cautionary narrative to the agendas of pious reading. Caught in this pincer grip of generic constraint, applied equally in contexts of pious and pernicious literacy, the servant subject searches to free itself, recognizing how formal freedoms begin in self-conscious literariness.1 The search to accommodate a self to uncongenial generic restrictions is, in the case of servants, compounded by other physical and psychic constraints that made life writing problematic.
